Drug cops to Obama: Your pot comments were wrong

California’s politically influential California Narcotic Officers’ Association has a message for President Obama: Take back your positive comments about legalizing marijuana.

To catch you up, Obama — who has acknowledged his teenage stoner days, if not his membership in the Choom Gang — recently told the New Yorker that “I don’t think (marijuana) is more dangerous than alcohol.”

That was the money quote pulled from a longer, more nuanced take. Nevertheless, to the Leg-a-lize It community, hearing the leader of the free world say that was better than a bag without seeds.

But in a Jan. 30 letter to Obama released Tuesday, Cal Narcs prez Steve Riddle stomped all over that buzz, asking Obama to “retract your comments on marijuana and alcohol. They are being misused by people with their own legalization agenda to somehow make the argument that the legal status of alcohol demands legalization of yet another addictive substance that will inevitably be commercialized and marketed to children.”

Riddle piled a big guilt trip on Obama by dropping a Nelson Mandela reference on him.

“We would suggest that you reevaluate your comparison of alcohol and marijuana, keeping in mind the words of the late South African President Nelson Mandela:

” ‘We should never underestimate the dangers of the drug problem and the high price that it exacts from many countries, including our own. It is a serious threat not only to the moral and intellectual integrity of our nation and other nations. It is a serious threat to the health and well-being of our people.’ “

Oh no you didn’t!

The Riddle vs. Obama tete a tete comes as multiple efforts to legalize marijuana may be before California voters in November. And Riddle’s 8,000-member group will be at the forefront of opposing any and all that qualify.

That’s why it was important for Riddle to try to diminish what Obama said about pot. From Riddle’s letter:

“I would never condone or make reference to any substance that could diminish my children’s future success as being ‘less harmful.’

“Playing video games, eating junk food, and not exercising are ‘a bad idea, a waste of time, [and] not very healthy.’ Using marijuana, or any other drugs for that matter, is simply dangerous. I am sure you would never open the door for your children to even think it is okay to use marijuana for any reason. Because of your honorable position as the leader of our great nation, you should hold the children of our nation to the same standard as your own children.”

John Lovell, the group’s Sacramento lobbyist, told me Tuesday that the New Yorker dope riff was Obama’s “Billy Buckner moment.” For you nonsports fans, Buckner was a very good Major League Baseball player who has been defined by one play toward the end of his career where a ground ball skittered through his legs in the World Series, preventing his Boston Red Sox from wrapping up the championship.

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Less dangerous, he said, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer. It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.” What clearly does trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations for marijuana among minorities. “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he said. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.” But, he said, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.” Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that “it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”

As is his habit, he nimbly argued the other side. “Having said all that, those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these social problems I think are probably overstating the case. There is a lot of hair on that policy. And the experiment that’s going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge.” He noted the slippery-slope arguments that might arise. “I also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?”